I spent Thursday and Friday in Zurich, Switzerland visiting my friends Marcus and Caitlin and attending the Google Open Source Jam.

On Thursday, I arrived in the early afternoon in Zurich. Getting to Zurich from Siegburg is easy and takes less than five hours as there is a direct ICE connection to Basel and from there it is just one more stop with an …

According to this article in ComputerWorld, MySQL to get injection of Google code. Google has signed an agreement to contribute to MySQL (oddly enough called a contributer license agreement) and will contribute source code for a variety of technical items.

In a way, this can be considered a very strong endorsement of MySQL by Google. Google even has an engineer dedicated to working with MySQL and the MySQL development team. I didn't realize that Google was such a heavy user of MySQL. Google will contribute some code related to replication and monitoring.

Also noted in the article is that MySQL, in the future of course, will support role based security and even Transparent Data Encryption (TDE). TDE is a big selling point for financial companies and other companies heavily regulated by privacy concerns. TDE puts the burden of encryption …

The amount of data out there via API's is increadible these days. For instance you can take an address, and get the latitude and longitude using Google's GeoCoding API.

I am using this API along with some others to build a pretty some interesting stuff (more on that when its public).

Today I needed to calculate the distance between two points, I found a bunch of formulas here to convert two lats and longs into miles. They had some more complicated formulas, but I went with an easier one because approximate accuracy was sufficent. Here's how the formula translated into SQL (tested on MySQL):

SELECT id, place_name,
ROUND( SQRT( POW((69.1 * (#Val(arguments.latitude)# - latitude)), 2) + POW((53 * (#Val(arguments.longitude)# - …

After speaking at Yahoo earlier, I drove a few miles down the street to Google for MySQL Camp. I caught the last session of the day, by Googlers saying how they used MySQL internal to Google. (I assume for the Adwords application.) Here are the stream-of-talking notes I took. The most fascinating bits I took out of it is how they take a partitioning/sharding strategy similar (but notably different in some ways) to WordPress.com and that they use DNS to manage all load balancing, high availability, datacenter failover, etc. DNS is a pretty powerful building block.

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Jay Pipes is a co-author of the recently published Pro MySQL recently spoke at Google on MySQL Performance Tuning Best Practices

You can check out a video of the presentation on Google Video

There is also a good video from Google called The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less.

In reading Richard MacManus' Why Google is extending RSS, I couldn't help feeling that he was missing the point a bit. It's as if he was focusing on the small things ("Why RSS?") rather than looking at the bigger picture of where all this is going.

It's not about building an easier onramp to Google Base.

Well, it is. But, again, that's the small stuff.

GData is the realization of the future that Adam Bosworth spoke about at the 2005 MySQL Users Conference.

It just so happened that I re-listened to his talk a several weeks ago during a walk to the bank. Hearing it for the second time, I was much more receptive to his ideas about creating a simple and open replacement for all the …